Intel Demos Dual-Core Xeon Processors, Supporting Platforms.

The world’s most influential manufacturer of microprocessors, Intel Corp., last week demonstrated servers running the company’s dual-core processors for dual-processor and multi-processor machines. The company said it would provide “thousands of seed systems” containing dual-core Xeon processor to software and hardware developers this year in order to ensure that the infrastructure takes advantage of dual and multi-core chip designs. Commercial shipments of the dual-core Intel Xeon processors are scheduled for 2006.

At its Intel Spring Analyst meeting in New York on Thursday, Abhi Talwalkar, general manager of Intel’s Digital Enterprises Group showed off two working servers running upcoming dual-core implementations of Xeon code-named Dempsey and Paxville, respectively, claims a report at TechWeb web-site.

Intel Xeon processors for 2-way servers or workstations code-named Dempsey is a part of the company’s server platform code-named Bensley, which is based on Blackford chipset. The platform will support FB-DIMM memory, PCI Express bus and is expected to support Intel’s Hyper-Threading and Active Management Technology. According to Intel, first shipments of the Bensley platform development kit were scheduled for mid-Q2 – late-Q2 2005.

Intel Xeon MP processor internally called Paxville for multiprocessor servers is compatible with Truland platform infrastructure based on E8500 core-logic.

“This processor just arrived in terms of silicon fairly recently… We’re going to be sampling to OEMs so they can start their qualification cycles. Remember, this processor drops into systems that are shipping today, so it’ll take much less time to get them running than if you were building brand new systems. We’ll ship seed systems to the marketplace in the second half of this year. We’ll have an OEM ramp-up in early 2006,” Abhi Talwalkar is reported to have said.

In contrast to Intel Corp., its arch-rival Advanced Micro Devices has been shipping its AMD Opteron 800-series dual-core processors for MP servers for a couple of weeks now and aims to ship a lineup of dual-core products for 1P, 2P servers as well as desktops by the end of the quarter.